Mirror Shards
by Bringer of the Storm
Summary: When a mirror shatters, the pieces fall, and there they shatter even further…How long can Kakashi hold up before he shatters so far that even he can't pick up the pieces?


Mirror Shards

_When a mirror shatters, the pieces fall, and there they shatter even further…_

* * *

Tsunade walked into her office to see Kakashi sitting there with his hands in his lap, staring blankly off at a point on her wall. He didn't flinch or glance over to where she entered; he just continued staring at whatever interesting speck had appeared on her wall this time. Briefly, she wondered just how he could keep his eyes so empty—usually eyes were the one thing that let you see what was really going on underneath the surface, no matter how blank the rest of the face was. It didn't work with Kakashi, however.

She was so involved in this brief thought that she was actually startled when Kakashi's voice came out, harsh and rasping and broken…

"I'm here to report on the mission, Gondaime-sama."

She knew what had happened then. He'd never called her Gondaime-sama, not ever.

* * *

Kakashi sat on his bed, staring briefly around his apartment. The plant on his windowsill was looking a bit brown around the edges; he probably had to buy a new one again, since he was pretty sure he'd forgotten to water it for about a week and a half…

He wondered how he could think of such things when his students, his teammates, were once again buried beneath the ground because of his failure.

How was he supposed to know, though, that the fully powered Rasengan and Raikiri would have such an effect when they hit the same target? This time, Naruto and Sasuke hadn't even been aiming the attacks at each other—they'd been aiming them at some stupid shinobi who'd gotten it into his head that it would be a good idea to try and deter them from reaching Sand. Kakashi was the one who figured that it would just be fastest to blast him with a Rasengan and a Raikiri, especially since he proved rather resilient to other, less tiring methods of killing him. And, after all, they'd have plenty of time to rest up during the last leg of the journey to Sand.

Rasengan and Raikiri had been aimed true. They hit…and they produced one of the hugest backlashes he'd ever seen since the Kyuubi had been locked away.

For some stupid reason, he'd been outside the borders of the backlash. Sasuke, Naruto, and Sakura hadn't been so lucky.

Goddamnit, there weren't even any ashes left to collect after that. They'd all been burned away into tiny little molecules floating up into the air. He'd been forced to leave the site without anything left to give to Sakura's parents, to leave for them at the memorial stone.

He hadn't known what would happen…but that didn't prevent it from being his fault. His failure. Again.

* * *

Gai was surprised when he saw Kakashi walk out of his apartment the next day. It wasn't so much that he had even appeared in public the day after losing his entire team (the announcement had been made yesterday, though few people understood what that would mean for Kakashi, who had lost his team a second time,) even though Gai knew that normally Kakashi refused to come outside for at least a week after any sort of bad mission.

It wasn't that Kakashi, for once, didn't look like he'd starved himself, forgotten to shave, or had just spent the week lying on his back staring at the ceiling.

It wasn't that he was carrying a dead plant in his hands, holding it as if it were a delicate eggshell about to break. He'd disposed of plants before, especially since he had a tendency to kill them within about a month of receiving them from some well-wishing friend (hadn't this one come from his team, come to think of it?)

It was that, for the first time since he'd been about five, Kakashi was out in public without his mask on.

People actually turned and stared at the jounin walking past, doing double takes and whispering amongst themselves whether it was really Kakashi, or some idiot trying to disguise himself as the Copy-nin who had forgotten the mask. Kakashi himself seemed impervious to the whispers and stares, walking forward with a single-minded purpose, still clinging to that plant.

If Gai had thought about it, really, he probably would have realized why Kakashi had left his mask off. Since he was too stunned to realize the significance, he just stood and stared like all of the other people on the street.

Kakashi knew, however.

All of the people he had lost had tried so hard to see his face when they were alive. Even after his first team had died, he'd still seen some purpose to the mask. It hid the times when he was silently crying, after all.

Now that he had failed a second time, it didn't seem fair to him that he could still keep small comforts when they were beyond that point. The least he could do was let them see his face, even if they weren't actually there.

* * *

Tsunade didn't know what to do with Kakashi anymore. She had tried sending him on missions with other jounin, but he refused any mission that ranked higher than "C". He'd also be hours late for any mission that he actually accepted, and then would complete it without saying a word to the others involved. Solo missions he would take as well, but when he returned he would go straight to his apartment and hole himself up again, refusing to let even Gai in.

Oddly enough, he'd also gone and buried his dead plant, but not before leaving three leaves of it before the memorial stone and one of its flowers on the Haruno doorstep.

Really, she thought, it would have been easier if he'd been one of those ninja who tried to kill themselves when things like this happened. At least that she would be used to dealing with.

He had refused ANBU assignments, too. She'd had a couple of ninja who had reverted back to wanting to mindlessly kill people in retaliation for their teammates being taken away, but Kakashi hadn't fallen into that category, either.

Goddamnit, he hadn't even fallen into the category of ninja who just retire and lounge around in their chairs all day. That would have been easy, too.

Finally, she had exhausted almost all of her options in the hope of avoiding the one she really didn't want to use. Kakashi left her with no choice, however. It was almost as if he were pushing her to do this because it was what he truly needed.

Tsunade sent him a scroll with his new team assignment early in the morning, two months after his old team had died.

* * *

She had been merciful, Kakashi decided as he surveyed the genin he'd been assigned. She'd picked the people least like Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura. Actually, if he had to compare them to anyone, he'd say that they reminded him far more of Ino, Shikamaru, and Chouji. He absently wondered if he'd actually be able to make this dynamic work now that he was so used to working with what amounted to the same three people.

They managed to pass the bell test after a lot of fumbling and cursing and falling all over each other in true genin form. They also were at least all acquainted with each other and didn't seem to harbor any strange grudges or crushes. The girl was loud and bossy and a fairly decent fighter, though she also had a pretty deep mean streak. One of the boys was lazy and complained constantly, to the point where Kakashi wanted to break his jaw so he'd just shut up for once, but he also managed to manipulate his chakra well enough that he made up for it. The other boy didn't say much, but that was because he wasn't too bright and preferred to chew gum constantly. He wasn't brilliant at much of anything and was generally a hindrance to the team, but the others put up with it.

He held them back for a year before letting them try for chuunin, mostly because he didn't think they'd manage to survive the training grounds otherwise. Subconsciously he knew he was doing all he could to keep them out of danger so there was no chance of him failing once again, but he tended to ignore that line of thought. It wasn't very useful, after all. They passed the chuunin exam fairly easily, strangely enough, and were taken out from under his command so he could train a new set of genin. He went through this cycle over and over until he realized that Tsunade was trying to keep him busy and so inundated with new teams to train that he would forget all about what had happened to the first two teams he had commanded (he didn't count all of those he had failed, because really, he hadn't been stuck with them for more than a couple of hours.)

Finally, though, Tsunade delegated team assignments to someone else while she went off for a day. When he came to the training grounds to meet his new team (on time, as he had been ever since he'd been assigned a new team,) he almost wanted to turn and run away. They even looked like Team 7. Damnit, hadn't Tsunade put a note on his file or something? Was the person doing assignments that incompetent?

He kept them, though, and slowly realized that while these genin might have looked like Naruto, Sakura, and Sasuke, they weren't really all that much like them. The girl didn't exhibit the perfect chakra control that Sakura had, and neither of the boys had either the anti-social vibe of Sasuke or the naïve cluelessness of Naruto. As he came to realize this, he started to resent them a bit for not being _them_, and he gave them up to some other jounin.

That was the last team Tsunade ever gave him.

* * *

Tsunade had known she was dying for a while. All the times she had used her cell regeneration jutsu during the battles against Orochimaru and the Akatsuki had really taken their toll on her body, and it had finally worn itself down to the point where she could no longer make herself look young again.

Boy, the village had sure been shocked when she walked outside looking her age. Her appearance hadn't been _that_ bad, she thought irritably.

Honestly, she'd given a lot of thought to who she would name as her successor. Her original plan had been to pick Naruto, and maybe asking Iruka to keep an eye on him during his first couple of years, but obviously that plan wasn't going to work.

Her second thought had been Konohamaru, Naruto's…protégé, but he had died recently, right before he tested for jounin.

Her third thought had been to just fuck it, and let the village deal with it after she died. It'd be one less headache for her, and it'd certainly make her last few days a hell of a lot easier. However, her nagging sense of duty prevented her from doing that.

Finally, she came to yet another conclusion she'd been trying to avoid. She knew Kakashi was the strongest of the jounin in the village. She knew it, really, but she didn't want to know it. That would mean forcing Kakashi to shoulder the responsibility of protecting the entire damn village, and she knew he'd accept because of his annoying sense of duty, and she didn't want to force the broken man to break himself further.

However, she was left with no choice, and she left Kakashi's name to Shizune when she died.

* * *

Kakashi sat there with the ridiculous hat on his head, still trying to wrap his brain around the fact that he was the Hokage. What the hell? He'd been Hokage for several months, in fact, but he still couldn't wrap his brain around it.

It was hard to believe that Tsunade would pick him, of all people, after he had failed the only two teams he had stuck with for any period of time. He'd seriously considered turning down the position, especially since he was convinced that he would only fail the village in time. However, peace had been enduring for a while now that Orochimaru and the Akatsuki were wiped out, so he eventually decided to take it.

It had stopped Naruto's screams for a while, just as Itachi's death had gotten Sasuke's sullen glare out of his mind's eye for a few months. Sakura had never really gone away, though; she was a constant presence hovering in his mind, and he eventually accepted that she, like Obito and Rin, would never ever go away, even temporarily.

The first thing he had done as Hokage had seemed a bit odd to people. He had built a high wall around the entire village, about fifty feet high and ten feet thick all the way around. When questioned about it, he just shrugged and said that he figured it would be a good idea, and never elaborated beyond that.

Gai knew, though. He knew that it was just another mask for Kakashi.

* * *

Peace had endured for a while, but eventually all good things come to an end.

That's what Gai told himself, anyway, as he prepared himself for yet another attack on the village. They had received word at sunset that the Earth country had decided to rise against Fire, and that the Hidden Leaf was needed. It was suddenly a repeat of when the Kyuubi had still been around, except other people were their enemies now, and there was no Yondaime to save them.

Kakashi had become rather silent once word of the Earth's plans had come out. He hadn't spoken more than three words at a time to anyone after that, and took to spending hours locked up in his office, out of sight. Gai was worried about him, but respected his friend's privacy. After all, he knew this was what Kakashi had feared all along.

Every day, reports of new dead ninjas came in. Kakashi's face must be carved of stone, because the blank expression never left it now. Gai knew that he must be taking the new deaths as yet another sign of his failures, particularly when most of the teams he'd trained to chuunin turned up dead or missing. Come to think of it, Gai mused, the only one that hadn't was the one that Kakashi had given up after only a couple of months. He was sure that hadn't gone unnoticed by their Hokage.

Now, as he prepared to go out into the field again, he saw Kakashi stride out in his jounin vest and the silly hat. He was also wearing goggles, a leaf headband (up over his forehead revealing the Sharingan—why?), and carrying a frog purse filled with medical supplies. Strangely enough, there were also a couple of shoots of a plant tucked into his headband.

Gai watched Kakashi jump up to the top of the wall, the only thing blocking the invading ninjas from entering Konoha at the moment. Briefly he wondered why they hadn't just knocked down the damn wall, and then he figured it out. Simple military tactics, really—if all of the Konoha ninjas came down over the wall, the invaders would have the advantage simply because they had a static position while the Konoha ninja were free-falling over the wall and trying to organize themselves.

Kakashi raised his hand, and the sound chirping birds filled the air. It was five times louder than before, however, like five hundred birds instead of just one hundred.

It was then that Gai knew that, one way or another, Kakashi wasn't going to be coming back from this battle.

Later, after the war with Earth was over, Gai went over to the memorial. It struck him that, after he started receiving team assignments once again, Kakashi had stopped coming here. He wondered why, until he saw the five white lilies sprouting from the ground right beneath the memorial, each with a strip of black material tied around its stem. He realized that, along with the removal of his mask, Kakashi had buried whatever had made him human along with the plants here at the memorial.

Gai made sure that he planted a sixth lily with the others, and that he cut a piece of material off of each of the other lilies to tie onto it.

* * *

_And when the mirror's on the floor, all broken and dead and dark, there's no one to pick up the pieces…_

  
Author's Notes: Er...yes. About that. Well, I like Kakashi torture, even if this isn't really _torture_, persay. I just thought I'd be interesting to kill off Team 7 and then go from there. shrug Also, there's some speculation that Kakashi will be the next Hokage after Tsunade, so I figured I'd throw that in, too.

I'm not really sure how much I like this fic, but I figured I'd post it since I got sick of rewriting it. Concrit is always greatly appreciated.


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